Tornado Weather by Deborah E. Kennedy

Author:Deborah E. Kennedy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

Your Sister’s Keeper

(June)

You never know about some people.

That was the consensus of the Colliersville Baptist Church Saturday Afternoon Knitting Circle regarding the whole Helen Garrety business. Everybody said it was sad, how poor Helen lost her only grandson to the Iraq war. After all, Helen had raised Kenny from a baby and now the only things she had to live for were her herbs and her nutty daughter, Frannie, who, rumor had it, was swaddled away in some cult in Idaho and couldn’t care less about coming home to pay her respects. What kind of mother does such a thing? The Frannie Garrety kind of mother, that’s who. The kind who gets pregnant at fifteen and skips town when the kid needs her most.

Then there was a terrible snafu at the casualty notification office and Helen, Kenny’s true next of kin, heard about his death on CNN.

“They called Frannie instead, and Frannie, idiot that she is, didn’t even think to call Helen,” said Shellie Pogue. “Can you imagine?”

The women shook their heads.

“It’s almost enough to make one question one’s faith,” Shellie said.

“Almost,” Peggy Norquist said.

Everyone was there except Helen—Ruby Rodgers, the mayor’s wife, in her broomstick skirt and peasant blouse; Una Prokus, who was fifty-two but you’d never know it to look at her; Peggy, with her purple needles and granny glasses; and Shellie, who held Kenny’s obituary from the Colliersville Record crumpled in her hand. She’d cut it out that morning along with coupons for Tide, Kraft Singles, and Moon Pies.

The women shared the church’s largest basement room with Alcoholics Anonymous, who met there every Tuesday. The orange carpet smelled of twenty-year-old cigarette smoke, bad coffee, and off-brand men’s cologne. One whole wall was given over to an illustrated poster of the Twelve Steps and another to a poem a local member had written about her struggle for sobriety. The poem seemed to be about rainbows, Asian carp, Riesling, and God. Shellie read it to herself sometimes when the conversation lagged, wondering why it didn’t rhyme.

At the request of Ruby, they were knitting hats for the Mexican children, who, Ruby said, spent most of their mornings shivering away in that Bottoms apartment complex that flooded every spring and summer and was pretty much wall-to-wall poison mold. Shellie made her hat somewhat grudgingly. What about the poor kids who were born here, tried and true? And what was the suffering of a few illegal kids in the face of Kenny Garrety’s death? Kenny was a real American. Kenny was a friend. Kenny was one of the heroes. Well, had been.

“Helen found out about Kenny while she was drinking her morning coffee,” Shellie said. She placed the obituary on the table in front of her and smoothed out its wrinkled corners. “Not so much as an ‘Are you sitting down?’”

This war was awful, just awful. It had to be fought to teach the terrorists and Saddam Hussein a lesson, but bloodshed was always regrettable, and Kenny had been such a nice boy, polite, shy, handsome if you ignored his wing-flap-like ears and the acne on his cheeks.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.